honor 999 women who’ve made important contributions to western history. Later, I was astonished to discover they were from Charleston, South Carolina, the same city in which I was then living. Somehow I’d never heard of these two amazing women, but I immediately dove in, learning everything I could, and the more I learned, the more excited I became. I discovered that Sarah and Angelina were from a wealthy slave-holding family, at the top of the planter class, moving in the elite circles of society, and yet they broke with everything—their family, religion, homeland, and traditions—and became the first female abolition agents in America and among the earliest feminist thinkers. They were, arguably, the most radical females to ever come out of the antebellum South. I fell in love with their story. I was especially drawn to Sarah. I was moved by how thoroughly life was arranged against her and what she overcame, by how deeply she yearned to have a voice in the world, by how utterly human she was, and how determinedly she invented her wings.
I came of age in prefeminist America. In 1963, the same year Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique and reignited the women’s revolution, I sat in a home economics class in high school, hemming skirts and learning how to make a home into a man’s castle. I still recall the list of occupations for women I copied off the blackboard: teacher, nurse, secretary, sales clerk, homemaker . . . As I recall, there were fewer than twenty of them. I remember this moment quite well because I harbored a deep and formidable desire to be a writer, and it was nowhere on the roster. When I headed to college, I studied nursing, a noble profession, but it wasn’t my place of belonging. I hadn’t yet figured out how to think and act outside the confines of the world that shaped me. It took eight years after graduating from college for me to break out and pursue writing. Today, that reminds me a little of Sarah, who also had failures of courage and who was sometimes slow to take her leap. Oddly enough, it wasn’t Friedan’s book that shook me. It was Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening. Edna Pontellier’s agonizing struggle against the limits her culture placed on women nearly leveled me. The lives of Sarah and Angelina Grimké affected me in a similar way. I know the world is radically different now, but I’m a believer that girls and women, and all of us really, need all the stories of courage and daring we can get.
2. The Invention of Wings is voiced by two verbally powerful narrators: Sarah Grimké, who is inspired by the real-life abolitionist and feminist of the same name, and Hetty Handful, who is the child of your imagination. How does creating a character from the ground up differ from adapting a real person into a fictional persona, and which do you find more challenging?
One of the more unexpected things I experienced in writing the novel was that Handful’s character and voice came to me with more ease than Sarah’s. Handful would talk, talk, talk. Often I couldn’t keep up with her. When I first began writing in her voice, the only parameters I gave myself were that I didn’t want her voice to be weighed down with dialect and it must have traces of humor. I’d read a great many first-person slave narratives from the nineteenth century, as well as the Federal Writers’ Project of the 1930s, and I had the voices of African American women from my own childhood still resonating in me, along with those of the quilting women of Gee’s Bend, but I think what made Handful so accessible to me was her free, unrestricted reign in my imagination. She did not come with the fetters of a previous history. She could speak and do as she wished.
Sarah, on the other hand, came with a large historical script, and that turned out to be one of my biggest challenges. I revered Sarah’s history to the point that I initially became boxed in by it. In the beginning, I had a hard time letting her venture outside factual borders. The longer she was cooped up by the facts, the quieter she got. I’d read the Grimké sisters’ diaries and essays, and while they gave me an extraordinary glimpse into their lives, their writing was rendered in nineteenth-century language, wrapped in rhetoric, piety, and stilted phrases. I wanted